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A Brain That Can't Hear Music

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Oliver Sacks discusses some bizarre cases from his most recent book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.”

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Oliver Sacks:

Oliver Sacks is a psychiatrist and neurologist best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.

In 1966, Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. They became the subjects of his book Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and the Oscar-nominated feature film called Awakenings.

In July of 2007, Sacks was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university's first Columbia University Artist. Sacks Latest book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007), was has been Revised and Expanded in a new edition that was released in September of 2008.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What was the most remarkable experience you had working on the book?

Oliver Sacks: Something I found very remarkable and not easy to imagine, because I was brought up in a sort of fairly musical world, and music is an essential part of my world, was to meet someone, a delightful, intelligent lady who lives in New York who cannot perceive music as such, cannot recognize music.

This was apparent when she was a little girl, when she couldn’t recognize any music. Or when she was asked to sing, she really didn’t know what was meant. And people were puzzled because she wasn’t deaf. She could speak perfectly well and hear their speech and ambient noises, but she seemed to have no idea of what music was about.

And when she was tested at one point, she really couldn’t say whether one note was higher or lower than another note.

She tried to get interested in music. She would go along with boyfriends, now her husband, to concerts and she found the experience somewhere between unintelligible and excruciating.

People often suffer from the feeling that they are unique. And she saw an article some years ago saying that, yes, there’s a thing called congenital amusia, and some researchers in Canada were working on this. And she got in touch with the people in Canada and they came and visited her, and they tested her, and they were very reassuring.

They told her, first, she is not the only person in the world like this. There are some others, and they’d be happy to introduce her to some fellow amusiacs. They said, second, this was not just bad motivational or neurosis as her family has said. This was a real neurological condition, and a little part of her brain was not that well developed. And they also said to her, you don’t have to go to concerts anymore, and if your husband wants you to go to a concert, you say, “No. You go. I’ll go to a film or something.”

But, this lady, can’t hear tones or semi-tones. She can’t hear the intervals which compose a scale. She has no idea about music.

I spent a lot of time with her. She has a good ear for poetry and for language, but no ear for music. And so, for some reason, that sticks on my mind as very, very fascinating.

I think, in general what especially startled me is have the people talk about musical hallucinations. And a hallucination is not at all like a mental image. It’s very startling. People look around. They listen.

I first heard of this in the 1970’s. It was an old lady in a nursing home, and she described to me how she’d been woken one night by hearing songs sung very, very loudly. And for me, that thought was someone had the radio on loudly, and she was amazed, in fact outraged that someone would have a radio on that loud on the middle of the night when everyone was sleep, although she was rather surprised to find the people were still asleep.

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